This paper intends to contribute research on the simplification hypothesis by incorporating a multi-discourse analysis. The study compares non-specialized and academic specialized discourse with aim of describing their similarities difference in terms syntactic stylistic simplification. Considering two variables (non-specialized/specialized original/translated texts) allows for examination whic...

We present a method for lexical simplification. Simplification rules are learned from a comparable corpus, and the rules are applied in a context-aware fashion to input sentences. Our method is unsupervised. Furthermore, it does not require any alignment or correspondence among the complex and simple corpora. We evaluate the simplification according to three criteria: preservation of grammatica...

The task of identifying complex words (CWs) is important for lexical simplification, however it is often carried out with no evaluation of success. There is no basis for comparison of current techniques and, prior to this work, there has been no standard corpus or evaluation technique for the CW identification task. This paper addresses these shortcomings with a new corpus for evaluating a syst...

Collocational deficiency is a pervasive phenomenon in learner English. Language learners often fail to choose the correct combination of two or more words due to their unawareness of collocational properties in vocabulary. They are apt to adopt lexical simplification strategies such as using a synonymous or Ll-influenced expression. This paper presents a corpus-based study on the collocational ...

This paper describes our ongoing research project on text simplification for congenitally deaf people. Text simplification we are aiming at is the task of offering a deaf reader a syntactic and lexical paraphrase of a given text for assisting her/him to understand what it means. In this paper, we discuss the issues we should address to realize text simplification and report on the present resul...

RÉSUMÉ La simplification lexicale consiste à remplacer des mots ou des phrases par leur équivalent plus simple. Dans cet article, nous présentons trois modèles de simplification lexicale, fondés sur différents critères qui font qu’un mot est plus simple à lire et à comprendre qu’un autre. Nous avons testé différentes tailles de contextes autour du mot étudié : absence de contexte avec un modèle...

This paper looks at representing paraphrases using the formalism of Synchronous TAGs; it looks particularly at comparisons with machine translation and the modifications it is necessary to make to Synchronous TAGs for paraphrasing. A more detailed version is in Dras (1997a). 1 I n t r o d u c t i o n The context of the paraphrasing in this work is that of Reluctant Paraphrase (Dras, 1997b). In ...

We report on work in progress on extracting lexical simplifications (e.g., “collaborate” → “work together”), focusing on utilizing edit histories in Simple English Wikipedia for this task. We consider two main approaches: (1) deriving simplification probabilities via an edit model that accounts for a mixture of different operations, and (2) using metadata to focus on edits that are more likely ...

SIMPLIFICA is an authoring tool for producing simplified texts in Portuguese. It provides functionalities for lexical and syntactic simplification and for readability assessment. This tool is the first of its kind for Portuguese; it brings innovative aspects for simplification tools in general, since the authoring process is guided by readability assessment based on the levels of literacy of th...

The paper presents first results of an ongoing project on text simplification focusing on linguistic metaphors. Based on an analysis of a parallel corpus of news text professionally simplified for different grade levels, we identify six types of simplification choices falling into two broad categories: preserving metaphors or dropping them. An annotation study on almost 300 source sentences wit...